Peter Liguori, CEO, Fox Broadcasting, On Content That Matters

Peter Liguori gave a keynote this Saturday morning at the SAMMA Summit in New York City. He started with talking about the value of content, in this digital age: No matter how sexy distribution is made out to be, it is just pipes…it was what you put into the pipe that matter. Skin and sports has always driven the content business. It is the message that makes the medium, and creativity drives the bottom line.

Distributors desperately need the content we all produce to keep them in business. It is that simple, it is that hard.

Digital: I take a very unpopular stance: I contend that we will have the equivalent of TV networks online, and there will be the need for someone to aggregate. But it only augments what goes on in the more traditional outlets.

About competitors and quality: NBC has to be commended for sticking to good shows and waiting for them to blossom: The Office and now, Saturday Night Live, with Tina Fey’s Sarah Palin impression, is helping 30 Rock a lot as well. I wish we could do that. I put Arrested Development one year more than our management wanted to…I tried.